in his books, both printed and manuscript, as well as in his numerous drawings. But it is most of all in his Museum that we appreciate the prodigious extent of his views, bounded only, if that can be called a boundary, by the limits of animated nature.
John Hunter early showed the characteristic fea- tures of his mind, the interest he took in physiological inquiries, his capabilities of minute anatomical investigation, and his powers as an original thinker. Within ten years of his arrival in London, he had solved the problem as to the cause and mode of the descent of the testis in the foetus,—had closely ex- amined the connexion between the uterus and placenta,—had made that preparation, the oldest in the Museum, where, tracing the branches of the fifth pair of nerves in the nose, he was led to the conclusion that the organs of sense receive their endowments of ordinary sensation from that nerve, and to the more general proposition, “ that if we consider how various are the origins of the nerves, and how different the circumstances attending them, we must suppose a variety of uses to arise out of every peculiarity of structure;” thereby approaching more closely than any one else had done, to the principle subsequently established by Sir C. Bell; and, moreover, he had instituted a very ingenious set of experiments with the view of determining whether the veins possess the power of absorption.
When, soon after, he accompanied the army to the coast of France and the Peninsula, his duties as Staff-Surgeon did not prevent him pursuing those physiological inquiries in which he took so much
